La Vita E Bella

Life is Beautiful is a fantastic Italian academy award-winning film about WW1 and Jews in Italy. I've read a few reviews about how people have hated this film cos it seems to poke fun at the suffering and torment the Jews encountered, but this film isn't meant to be a realistic portrayal of the Holocaust anyway. It's simply a device to get the true meaning of love and sacrifice out..

There wasn't a need to describe what happened, the things the characters went through echoed what concentration camp prisoners went through in a terribly haunting way.

There are 2 parts of the movie, complete polar opposites in setting. Before the concentration camp, the main character Guido is this happy-go-lucky man in a world of brightly coloured flowers and laughter and singing and bizarrely wonderful occurences. And then inside the camp, everything is dark and damp and terrifying, and he has to fight to maintain his happy-go-lucky nature for his little bambino (child), knowing that if he falters, his son will be forever traumatized and most likely will die.

I think the best thing about the movie is the subtle way the Holocaust is portrayed. After all, if every book or movie made about the Holocaust just reflected Jews and others being beaten, starved and eventually killed, audiences would grow weary of the story - read one book or see one movie and you've seen them all.

One review was pretty accurate: "The Holocaust is a sacred thing for many people, and there are 2 classes of people. One class doesn't want anything said about the Holocaust because talking about it undermines it. You can't say or describe anything that will equal the horror of the Holocaust.

The other class wants to say things in new, unheard-of ways - like writing a story that takes place in America during the 1920s that represents the Holocaust in a new way."

It's not about showing the whole holocaust and all its suffering. It's actually about a Jewish man trying to protect his young son at all costs and to let his Italian wife know there is still some hope whenever he can.

Even till the very end, I was still hoping somehow for a miracle for him. But it didn't happen, and I didn't need to see it, hearing it was enough.

Great movie (:

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Every day
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
Violence, terrorism,
War,
The end of the world.

It keeps my mind off things.

Roger McGough